Caught between bullying US and soft
EU By Ramtanu Maitra
Over the
past month, the screws have tightened considerably on
Iran, as the crisis over its nuclear enrichment program
deepens. Washington has refused to start a dialogue with
Tehran, despite the best efforts of International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Mohamed ElBaradei,
who was in Washington in mid-March. At the same time,
the European Union's efforts to mediate some sort of
"work-around" in the matter continue.
British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was scheduled on Thursday
to hold talks with his Iranian counterpart, Dr Kamal
Kharrazi, on international concerns over the country's
nuclear program.
The talks were likely to focus
on Iran's cooperation with United Nations nuclear
inspections as well as escalating violence in Iraq.
Straw, along with Germany and France, was instrumental
in persuading Iran to cooperate with the UN nuclear
agency over inspections of its nuclear programs.
There is growing international concern over the
country's capabilities after Iran last month resumed
work on a key nuclear program in apparent breach of its
deal with the United Nations. Britain demanded answers
after Iran announced a facility to convert uranium was
to be brought into service, despite its promise to
suspend all uranium-enrichment activities.
In a
deal with the IAEA struck late last year, Tehran agreed
to suspend uranium enrichment - and all related
activities - while UN inspectors investigated suspicions
the country was using a bid to generate atomic energy as
a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
On March
27, the embattled regime in Tehran allowed the UN
nuclear agency inspectors to return to Iran for the
first time since Tehran reversed an earlier decision to
bar them because of allegations that the country was
hiding banned activity. ElBaradei in Washington,
speaking to Public Broadcasting System (PBS) interviewer
Margaret Warner in New York on March 18, after his
meeting with President George W Bush and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the UN
non-proliferation czar said: "Well, I think, I saw some
degree of skepticism ... ". ElBaradei told PBS that he
was "just basically being an honest broker, telling the
two parties, let us bury the hatchet, let us sit
together, that's the only way to move forward".
ElBaradei's trip to Washington followed the
deepening of the crisis around Iran's nuclear enrichment
program, considered illegal by the IAEA and the five
nuclear weapons states. His initiatives were also
triggered by Bush's marking of Iran as one of the three
countries in the "axis of evil" and the US's belligerent
and confrontational attitude generally.
On March
18, ElBaradei told US Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage that it was "important for the United States to
talk to the Iranians", AFP reported, quoting an official
close to the talks. There were "signals from Iran that
Tehran is ready on this nuclear issue to talk",
ElBaradei reportedly emphasized.
According to a
March 16 news item in London's Financial Times, the US
has been stalling for 10 months over an Iranian offer of
landmark diplomatic talks because of divisions in the
Bush administration ranks. As a result, Washington has
given no indication that it is interested to work toward
lifting the 18-year-old sanctions imposed by the US to
cripple Iran's economy.
The European Union,
which routinely follows the lead fiddler while
pretending at independence from time to time, has done
no better. On March 22, the EU told Tehran that it will
not resume trade talks because of its worries over
Iran's nuclear program. Iran wanted negotiations with
the EU on a trade and cooperation agreement to allow
Iranian goods preferential access to European markets.
Apparently not quite aware who makes the EU monkey
dance, Tehran was hoping that Brussels would be able to
make decisions on trade without securing a green light
from Washington.
On March 18, in an interview
with CNN, Rice dismissed the need for US-Iranian talks.
In addition to reiterating America's old suspicion that
Iran is sheltering some al-Qaeda members, Rice also
cited concerns about the Iranian nuclear program.
The vote for re-inspection Rice's
comments followed on the heels of the IAEA decision to
re-inspect Iranian nuclear installations. What happened
in Vienna on March 13 does not bode well for the future
US-Iran relations. After a week's deliberations behind
closed doors in Vienna, the UN's nuclear watchdog, the
IAEA, adopted a resolution drafted by Canada, Australia
and the US criticizing Iran for withholding "sensitive
information" from the IAEA. The Malaysia-led Non-Aligned
Movement's (NAM)13 members in the board squabbled for a
while to change a few words in the resolution and
failed. China and Russia ostensibly provided support to
NAM's efforts. But at the end, the inevitable happened,
and the resolution was adopted as consensus.
US - the pied piper The resolution
noted with "serious concern that the declarations made
by Iran in October 2003 did not amount to the complete
and final picture of Iran's past and present nuclear
program considered essential by the board's November
2003 resolution, in that the agency has since uncovered
a number of omissions - eg a more advanced centrifuge
design than previously declared, including associated
research, manufacturing and testing activities; two mass
spectrometers used in the laser enrichment program; and
designs for the construction of hot cells at the Arak
heavy water research reactor - which require further
investigation, not least as they may point to nuclear
activities not so far acknowledged by Iran."
The
passing of the resolution means that the Iranian nuclear
installations will be inspected again by the UN
inspectors and they would subsequently present a report.
That report would be the basis for the next round of
discussion among the 35-member board of IAEA governors
in June for the next course of action vis-a-vis Iran.
The two-faced EU Iran, having admitted
the use of centrifuge, obtained through the black market
for the enrichment of uranium, had its hopes pinned on
the EU to get out of the economic jam it is in for
almost two decades. The hopes were based on earlier
interactions between EU and Iran on the matter. On
October 21, after concerted diplomatic interactions
between senior Iranian officials and Straw, French
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and German
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Iran announced that it
would temporarily suspend its uranium enrichment program
and sign the Additional Protocol requiring more robust
inspections by the IAEA. In exchange for full
compliance, the three European ministers stated that
"this will open the way to a dialogue on a basis for
longer term cooperation which will provide all parties
with satisfactory assurances relating to Iran's nuclear
power generation program".
This interaction took
place in the backdrop of IAEA's claims that it has
collected evidence that Iran is enriching uranium,
ostensibly for making weapons. IAEA issued another
report on November 10, 2003. The US, which had accused
Tehran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, wanted the
matter taken before the UN Security Council for possible
punitive action. But Britain, Germany and France, at the
time, said their policy of constructive engagement with
Iran had begun to bear fruit. On November 21 the IAEA
accepted Iran's proposal to sign on to an Additional
Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
that allows for unannounced inspections of its
facilities.
"If Europe fails to fulfill its
commitments, our cooperation will not continue," Iranian
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi had told reporters on
the sidelines of a cabinet session in Tehran last
November. Last December, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the
Iranian vice-president who also heads Iran's Atomic
Energy Organization, had called on Britain, France and
Germany to honor their words and help secure the release
of nuclear equipment that Iran has bought. He did not
say where the Iranian imports were blocked, but it is
known that Iran has purchased nuclear material from EU
states in the past.
"The equipment that we
purchased a long time ago - and there is no legal
prohibition on its use - has been held up at the factory
or customs of producing countries, and permission has
not been issued to export it to Iran," Aghazadeh told
state television recently. "We met all the demands of
the European countries. Now it is their turn to fulfill
their promises," Aghazadeh said.
The controversy
surrounding Iran's nuclear program came to the fore on
January 29, 2002, when Bush, in his state of the union
speech, identified Iran as one of the three countries in
the "axis of evil." A few months later, in December
2002, following Pentagon's public showing of commercial
satellite photos of Iran's undisclosed Nantanz nuclear
facility, wheels began to churn fast and furiously to
nail Iran's nuclear violations.
Washington's
unstated concern about Iran's enrichment program is that
it would develop nuclear weapons and challenge the
monopoly of nuclear weapons of Israel in the region.
There is, however, no indication that Iran is, in fact,
developing nuclear weapons. ElBaradei told the US
lawmakers at Capitol Hill on March 17 that "if you have
an enrichment program or a reprocessing program, which
means that you can produce uranium, or plutonium, you
are really sending a message that we know how to do it,
should we decide to make a weapon. We don't need to
develop a weapon, but I am telling the world, my
neighbors, that I can do it."
Iran's problems
revealed US officials, however, were not in a
mood to listen to what justification Iran had to offer
to explain the existence of the centrifuges, or mining
of uranium, and insisted outright that Iran's aim is to
mine or purchase uranium, process the ore and enrich it
to levels that would be suitable for the manufacture of
nuclear weapons. Tehran's admitted uranium mines, plus
the confirmation of the centrifuges at Nantanz, would
give Iran a largely indigenous capability to make
nuclear weapons, Washington officials declared.
Iran claims Nantanz will be used to produce
low-enriched uranium for civilian power plants that it
has yet to build and not for the Bushehr plant because
Russia will be supplying the fuel. Iran also says the
Nantanz facility will be under international safeguards,
which means monitoring equipment will be installed and
regular inspections carried out to ensure that no
enriched uranium is diverted to non-peaceful purposes.
While Washington kept the heat on the IAEA, the
US State Department dispatched its chief arms
negotiator, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, to
Moscow in May, 2003 for more talks with Russian nuclear
officials to dissuade them from further assisting Iran's
nuclear program. Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, or
Minatom, is building a hotly contested, US$800 million,
1000 MW light water reactor in the Iranian port city of
Bushehr that is scheduled to start running in late 2003
or early 2004. Minatom has subsequently said it will
offer to build a second reactor there. Pentagon
officials, in December 2002, said Moscow is helping with
the Nantanz uranium facility and with a heavy water
facility near Arak, in central Iran, which was also
revealed in the satellite photos.
US
hardliners to the fore But long before Bolton was
in Moscow, some US intelligence officials had expressed
their concern through the media. One of their concerns
is that if Iran is able to build a "supposedly" civilian
enrichment plant in Nantanz, it may as well develop a
clandestine nuclear enrichment plant elsewhere. Another
concern of theirs is that Iran might somehow divert
material from Nantanz and take it to a secret centrifuge
plant for enrichment to weapons-grade material.
Boosted by the US intelligence community's focus
on Iran's nuclear program, in February, 2003, an Iranian
exile group called National Council of Resistance of
Iran pointed out at a press conference that research and
testing on centrifuge technology was being carried out
by a "front company" near Tehran called the Kola
Electric Company. Iran says the company is a watch
factory and has nothing to do with a nuclear program.
Writing in the March issue of Arms Control
Today, Robert Einhorn, a senior adviser to the Center
for Strategic and International Studies and a life-long
arms control bureaucrat, was categorical in pointing out
that "Iran's agreement this past fall to adhere to the
Additional Protocol and suspend enrichment activities
was hardly an indication that Iranian leaders have made
the fundamental decision to abandon their quest for
nuclear weapons".
Einhorn also expressed hope
that it could be possible to convince the Iranian
leaders that "nuclear weapons are simply not in Iran's
interest". But in order to do that, the United States,
Europe and Russia need to stick together and confront
Iran with a stark choice: it can be a pariah with
nuclear weapons, or it can abandon its ambitions to get
nuclear weapons and become a well-integrated member of
the international community, Einhorn pointed out as a
way to solve the crisis.
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